History Matters Quotes

“Try to keep in mind that everyone you encounter along the way, no matter their background or station in life, knows something you don’t.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“The only thing new in the world, Harry Truman once remarked, was the history we don’t know.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“To be indifferent to history isn’t just to be ignorant, it’s often to be rude, to show a form of ingratitude.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“All great civilizations have had at least two things in common: confidence and a sense of continuity. And we gain both from our sense of the past.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“Nothing happens in isolation. Never has”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“the digital watch is the perfect symbol of our time. It only tells you what time it is now as if there had been no time before and no time to come.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“history is not dead”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“History is not the story of heroes entirely,” he said. “It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“We speak a language that isn’t ours,” McCullough notes in these pages. “It’s been handed down to us with a tradition of expression and power that is well worth a lifetime of study”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“The rendering of great history”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“If I tell you that the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I tell you that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that’s a story—you feel that.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“if our past can teach us anything, it is that education—education second to none and open to all—has been our salvation, our making.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“If the politicians of our time fail to meet the challenges of our time, we have only ourselves to blame. If we don’t vote, if we are unwilling to pay taxes, or even to take part in the census, then what good are we as citizens?”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“Be generous. Give of yourselves. Count kindness as all-important in life. Take interest in those around you. Try to keep in mind that everyone you encounter along the way, no matter their background or station in life, knows something you don’t. Get in the habit of asking people about themselves, their lives, their interests, and listen to them. It’s amazing what you can learn by listening.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“There’s no secret to making history come alive. Barbara Tuchman said it perfectly: “Tell stories.” The pull, the appeal, is irresistible, because history is about two of the greatest of all mysteries—time and human nature.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free,” Jefferson said, “expects what never was and never will be.” And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it has in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be—the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“History is not the story of heroes entirely,” he said. “It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That’s why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history—they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“Happiness—true happiness—is not to be found in vacations or the like. It’s to be found in the love of learning and doing what you really want to get up and get to each day.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“We don’t teach children. We just give them who we are. And they catch that. Attitudes are caught not taught. If you love something in front of a child, the child will catch that.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“is not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, we’ll deserve it.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“The Golden Gate Bridge was built when Franklin Roosevelt was in his first term. It was built in the era of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It was built at the time of the Berlin Olympics. Built at the time of the abdication of the King of England for “the woman I love.” Built during the Great Depression. And built during a period when two of the most important events of the twentieth century took place, foretelling everything that has so changed in our world. Two events that took place not much more than one hundred miles apart. One, in Copenhagen, where Niels Bohr and his colleagues at the Institute for Theoretical Physics determined that if the uranium atom were split, it would release a power beyond any previous understanding or example. And just across the way at a small German fishing village, the Nazi government had instituted the first rocket experimental station under the young, brilliant physicist Wernher von Braun.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“We will”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it has in our time”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“What history teaches”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“History shows us how to behave. History teaches”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“History”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“McCullough’s books”
― David McCullough, History Matters